Terry Michael, Politico.com, June 7, 2007
If you publicly pious candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination could look up from your talking points for a moment, I’d like to introduce you to the founder of our party — our earthly father, if you will, Thomas Jefferson. Consider some of President Jefferson’s views on religion and politics, which he expressed in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence … a wall of separation between church and state.”
Apparently, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) all decided they did, indeed, owe an accounting of their personal religious beliefs — a televised recitation, in fact — to an audience assembled Monday at George Washington University by the left-liberal-worthy Rev. Jim Wallis and channeled through a television anchor aptly (or at least euphoniously) named Soledad O’Brien.
The front-runners’ pandering to “people of faith” is the latest expression of Religion Lite advocated by the consultant wing of the Democratic Party.
After several decades of the religious right’s attempt to trash the First Amendment and Christianize America via the GOP (God’s Own Party?), we are now treated to the religious left and its heavenly claims on behalf of social justice.
The worst offender in the trinity of poll-directed faith hailers was, of course, Edwards, a trial lawyer to the underclass (he represented the middle class in 2004) and now the political servant of his “Lord Jesus Christ.”
Yes, he actually used the whole coded-for-evangelicals phrase — though, for some reason, those three words, which revealed just how much this former-Baptist-turned-Methodist was willing to prostrate himself before the pious, were omitted from news coverage of the affair in both The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Um…
The Episcopal Church is hardly Evangelical and that phrase “Lord Jesus Christ” is prevalently used in that church. Yeah i was raised loosely Episcopalian. And the phrase “Lord God” is used a lot.
So that Edwards used that phrase is NOT pandering to Evangelicals.
Okay other than that I am not happy with the Democrats that agreed to be interviewed regarding their faith. But not that unhappy either.
Comment by zenferret — June 7, 2007 @ 7:05 pm